The most important election in South America takes place tomorrow. Nearly 159 million Brazilians are eligible to vote in the first round of the election for President. The presidential vote takes place alongside elections for state governors, federal deputies, and the national congress. Brazil accounts for approximately 31% of Latin America and the Caribbean’s total gross domestic product (GDP), and is a founding member of South America’s…

In a recent post, I pointed out that US corporate profit margins (that’s profits as a share of national income) had reached record levels, 19.4%—the highest recorded in the US since the 1940s! The converse was the case for labour’s share which had fallen to a new low. If we measure the ratio of profits to wages in Marxist terms, namely as the rate of surplus value, we find that it has never been so high and thus an important counteracting factor in driving up the US rate of profit (that’s surplus value divided by the stock of the means of production plus employee compensation), particularly visible since the end of the pandemic.

The US economy continues to expand faster than other G7 economies, but the driver is the humungous investment in AI models, data centres and all the AI-related chips and technology.  The US composite PMI (economic activity measure) rose to 58.4 fom 56 in August, the strongest expansion in private-sector activity since July 2021 and marking a fourth consecutive month of accelerating growth.

Russia has elections to its parliament (Duma) starting today. This will also be the first legislative election in Russia to take place amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. At stake are 450 seats in the lower house of the Federal Assembly. Half of the seats (225) are elected by party-list proportional representation with a 5% electoral threshold in number of votes.

In part two of my report on IIPPE 2026 (part one is here), I could continue to report on several good presentations on China’s development, but part one was dominated by issues on China, so in part two I shall look at sessions on other topics. Chandrasekharan Saratchand, Professor of economics at Satyawati College, University of Delhi. presented his critique of so-called artificial ‘general’ intelligence (AGI).

The 16th Annual Conference in Political Economy took place in Lisbon, Portugal last week.  Organised by the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE), the theme of this year’s conference was Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next. IIPPE was founded in 2006 with the aim of “developing and promoting political economy in and of itself but also through critical and constructive engagement with mainstream economics, heterodox alternatives, interdisciplinarity, and activism understood broadly as ranging across formulating progressive policy through to support for progressive movements….

Sweden goes to the polls on today in an extremely close general election that could see the far right enter government for the first time if the country’s rightwing parties can form a majority. However, opinion polls show the centre-left opposition alliance ahead, with Magdalena ⁠Andersson of the Social Democrats the favourite to become prime minister again after four years in opposition.

“Is Keynesianism dead?” says Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, writing in the Financial Times. Haldane’s answer is “Keynesianism, if not dead, is potentially defunct.” What does he mean and why raise the question in the first place? The gist of it is that Haldane reckons Keynesian theory, namely that economic slumps or stagnation can be overcome by increased public spending, which…

The financial media and mainstream economists are in a huge tizz.  Government bond yields have risen sharply since the end of the pandemic slump to return to levels not seen since the global financial crash of 2008-9.  What is meant by a rise in ‘bond yields’? When governments and big companies borrow money, they don't ask a bank for a loan.

As the central bankers of the world met at Jackson Hole, Wyoming for their annual get together to discuss issues affecting the world financial sector and monetary policy, US statistics for corporate profits for the second quarter of 2026 were released. The figures were truly startling. US corporate profits surged by $401 billion in the second quarter of 2026. This pushed total corporate profits to a historic high of $4.3 trillion, or up nearly 23% since Q2 2025.

In this final part of the series on the causes of inflation, I consider the period since the end of the pandemic slump in 2020. Disinflation ended with the pandemic and inflation has returned.  The average annual rise in US consumer price inflation has been 3.9% in the 2020s and that rate is likely to rise further given the impact of the Iran war on the global price of energy, food and other commodities.

In an article entitled How economics is changing, FT columnist Harvey Nripia paints a generally positive picture of economics as an academic discipline in the 21st century.  He argues that economics has become more inventive and empirical and now provides, on the whole, increasingly useful advances in our knowledge about economies and how human societies can flourish.  No longer is economics ‘a dismal science’ that Thomas Carlyle was claimed to have called it in the mid-19th century.

In this post, I return to my review of the theories of the causes of inflation in modern economies. In the first part, I discussed the mainstream theories; in the second part, I discussed heterodox and other Marxist theories. In this third part, I present a value theory of inflation developed by Guglielmo Carchedi and myself. In our view, any explanation of inflation in modern capitalist economies must start with Marx's value theory.

Last week, the 19th Congress of the World Association of Political Economy (WAPE) took place at the University of Greenwich, London. WAPE is a Chinese-run academic economics organisation, linking up with Marxist economists globally. “Even though that might seem like bias, the WAPE forums and journals still provide an important outlet to discuss all the developments in the world capitalist economy from a Marxist perspective.

Back last February, I posted about the state of the Japanese economy when Sanai Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister called a snap general election, which she won in a landslide.  Takaichi, who models her views on Britain’s Margaret Thatcher of the 1980s and now on Trumpism, claimed she would be different from all past prime ministers.  She would cut taxes, in particular, the consumption tax which drives up prices in the shops, but at the same time increase government spending on social security and ‘defence’, even if it meant higher budget deficits.

This is the second part of my discussion of the causes of inflation in modern capitalist economies, based on an unpublished paper by Guglielmo Carchedi and me. There are various heterodox views on the causes of inflation. Generally, they argue against the mainstream focus on monetarism, excess demand and inflation expectations as discussed in part one. The heterodox views can be divided into two.

Guglielmo Carchedi and I have been working on a theory of inflation for several years. We completed a detailed paper some time ago which was accepted for publication by a Marxist journal. However, publication takes forever, so I thought I would provide a shortened version of our work on my blog. For the blog, I have divided the paper into various parts: 1) mainstream theories of inflation; 2) heterodox and other Marxist theories; 3) our theory, called a ‘value theory of inflation’; and finally 4) a discussion of the application of our theory to the recent spike in inflation since the paper was completed.

Alphabet (Google) announced its earnings results yesterday.  At first sight, the results were spectacular: revenue was up 24%, with revenue from its ‘cloud’ business up 82%.  Earnings per share were $9.11, which is very high.  But more than two-thirds of those earnings were based on booking $77bn from ‘unrealised’ gains from its purchase of shares in Anthropic, a major AI model firm. 

Why is Europe falling behind in investment and growth compared with the US, let alone China and India?  In a new report, Labour Squeezed, Investment Stalled – the renowned economist Mariana Mazzucato and a team at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, financed by the European Trade Union Federation (SETU), reckon that the EU’s declining competitiveness is not the result of too much regulation or the lack of cheap credit as mainstream economists and…

China's second quarter GDP growth saw a significant deceleration, down to 4.3% year over year from 5.0% in the first quarter and weaker than forecast. This was the slowest growth in any quarter since the pandemic lockdown hit in 2022. But, even with this Q2 slowdown, China’s real GDP growth for the first half of 2026 remains within the government’s target range at 4.7% YoY.

From hegemony to decline In just some 200 years from winning independence from the British empire in 1776, the United States had become the most successful capitalist state, leading all the major economies in the world in national output, in income per head, in productivity of labour, in financial dominance and in military power. That hegemony in global capitalism was established by the end of WW2, which had left Europe and Japan in ashes, Britain hugely in debt, and much of Asia, Latin America and Africa in poverty. 

It took some time after independence and the defeat of the British before the new economy of the United States got going.  War continued on and off with the British over Canada and ithrough a short British invasion and destruction of Washingto DC in 1812.  During this period, trade was volatile, rising to over 20% of GDP after the revolution and then collapsing during the subsequent war with the British.

Here are reviews of a few books that I could not ignore analysing this summer. Let’s start with How to win a trade war by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown.  Keynes, an ancestor of the John Maynard, formerly wrote for the Economist and now for the Financial Times.  Chad Bown is an international trade economist at the American Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)

Financial markets and the world in general let out a sigh of relief when Iran and the US finally agreed a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that, if impemented fully by the middle of August, would end the war in the Middle East and allow crude oil, fertilisers and other petroleum products to be transported unhindered through the Strait of Hormuz to markets in Europe and Asia.

This is an English translation of an interview published in Chinese by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2025 in World Socialist Research. 1. Michael Roberts, thank you for your time! Could you briefly tell us when you got to know and accept Marxism and what impact did your previous job in the City of London have? If you have a Marxist insight into the workings of finance capital, you are much less likely to assume that all will be well with financial investment.

Last weekend, the World Inequality Lab (WIL) organised the third edition of its World Inequality Conference,  held at the Paris School of Economics. The WIL hosts and maintains the World Inequality Database, the open-access database on global inequality. Probably the most famous of the WIL team are directors, Thomas Pikkety and Gabriel Zucman, the former for his magnum opus…

Goldman Sachs, the mega investment bank, reckons that AI is just “one big trade on the US economy”. And the AI investment bubble is getting even larger. In the last week, the AI model maker, Anthropic, announced that it was issuing shares to potential investors in what is called in stock market jargon, an Initial Public Offering (IPO).  Anthropic was following Elon Musk’s Space X planned IPO of a humungous $1.8trn. 

At the end of 2025, corporate profits in the major economies accelerated after stagnating in 2024. The global figure below is calculated from a weighted (by GDP) average of profits in the US, UK, Japan, Germany and China (taken from national accounts and in national currencies).    Average annual growth in global corporate profits during the 2010s – the decade of what I have called the Long Depression since the Great Recession of 2008-9 - was 3.9%. 

American Edmund Phelps recently died at thr age of 92. Phelps was a classic free market mainstream economist from the monetarist school and winner of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (the Riksbank prize in reality). Phelps researched and taught at Yale University until 1966. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote the papers that made him famous.

US president Donald Trump travels to China to meet China’s President Xi Jinping tomorrow, It will be the first time a US president has visited China in nearly a decade, with the last visit being Trump in 2017. The immediate issues before both leaders can be summarised as: 1) the trade war launched by Trump; 2) the Iran war launched by Trump and; 3) the tension over Taiwan, fostered by Trump.

In the recent state elections in India, the ruling BJP-led coalition government won resounding victories in some key states previously held by opposition parties. In the highly populated West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, India’s most powerful female politician, who had been in power for 15 years, saw her Trinamool Congress party (TMC) trounced by the BJP (she has refused to accept the result). 

Last week, crude oil prices in Asia hit a new high at $125/b amid reports that the US was considering military action against Iran to break the deadlock in peace talks. The global average oil price also reached $113/b, the highest since the post-COVID pandemic slump in 2022.  In the end, Trump backed off (for now) from that threat and said that ‘peace talks’ were still underway. 

Global imbalances are back on the agenda of the economic powers that be.  What are these ‘global imbalances'?  First, there is the imbalance in global trade, namely some countries run significantly large surpluses in goods and services exports over imports; while other countries run sizeable deficits on trade.  The global current account imbalance is the aggregate difference, currently 2% of world GDP a year.

This post reviews some recent economics books published by various authors, both Marxist and non-Marxist. Let me start with a magnum opus, Capitalism – a global history, by Sven Beckert. Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches the history of the United States in the 19th century and global history.  His ‘Capitalism’ is called a ‘monumental book’ by global inequality expert, Thomas Piketty, himself an author of an eariler gargantuan publication back in 2014 called…

The era of disinflation is over.  By disinflation, I mean a rise in overall prices of goods and services, but at a slowing rate.  Deflation means an actual fall in prices.  That has not been the case for many decades, not really since the end of money as a physical commodity, namely gold and the arrival of what are called…

Hungary has a general election tomorrow. Hungary is a relatively small country with less than 10m in population and with a GDP of just $220bn and with just 8.2m registered to vote. This election is pivotal, not just for Hungarians, but also for the EU Commission and the core European governments. The incumbent Fidesz government led by PM Victor Orban has been a thorn in the side of the EU for years.

Back in 2012, I made an initial attempt to go beyond measuring the rate of profit on capital in any one country and calculate a world rate of profit. Then, I argued that it was important to test Marx’s law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall on a world level. As capitalism had spread its tentacles to all parts of the world through the 20th century, it was necessary to find better empirical support for the law by calculating a world rate because capitalism is only a ‘closed economy’ at a global level.

In its latest review of the impact of the Middle East conflict on the world’s economies, the IMF summed it up: “Although the war could shape the global economy in different ways, all roads lead to higher prices and slower growth.” The global benchmark oil price is on course for its largest monthly rise on record in March, higher than in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Professor David Harvey is a highly influential Marxist geographer and economic theorist whose work spans several decades. He is the author of many important books over the decades analysing capitalism and its ever-changing features and contours. Although having turned 90 years old last October, he still teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Now in 2026 he has yet another new book, entitled…

The Iran war rages on.  Having failed to repeat his Venezuela option’’ ie decapitating the Iranian leaders and then getting Iran to surrender, US President Trump has been dragged into a long war.  So far, he has opted for escalation, cajoled by his advisers and forced on by unbridled attacks on Iran and Lebanon by Israel.  Strikes by both sides on so-called upstream gas production facilities in recent days are a significant escalation, with potentially long-term consequences.

This week 250 years ago, Adam Smith published An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations – and invented economics. Made up of five ‘books’ over 1000 pages, the Wealth of Nations is really the ‘old testament bible’ of classical political economy, with David Ricardo’s Principles of Economics, written in 1819, as the new testament.

Today the crude oil topped $95 per barrel, despite the International Energy Agency (IEA) approving its largest-ever release of emergency oil reserves, with member states set to release 400 million barrels. That had little effect on the oil price because Iraq had to halt operations at its oil terminals after two oil tankers were targeted in Iraqi waters. The Strait of Hormuz also remains effectively shut, with several commercial vessels reportedly struck off the coast of Iran.

The Chinese government is just completing its annual ‘two sessions’ or lianghui. The ‘two sessions’ refers to two major political gatherings: the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a political advisory committee; and the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislative body. These are ostensibly not meetings of the Communist Party, but instead are meetings of the Chinese state. The consultative meeting is largely symbolic, with leading business and local leaders appearing for pre-arranged discussions.

Today, Britain’s Labour Chancellor (finance minister) Rachel Reeves presented her Spring Statement on government spending plans for the next few years. She claimed that, after her prudent control of government finances i.e. not too much spending along with higher taxes, Britain’s public finances were now under control following the profligate spending of the previous Conservative government. Now Britain was set to motor upwards, having regained the confidence of international investors and the domestic corporate sector.

Oil prices rose nearly 9% toward $73 per barrel today, the highest in over eight months, as the joint US and Israeli strikes on Iran sharply escalated tensions across the Middle East. And it seems that the narrow Strait of Hormuz, a vital chokepoint that handles roughly one-fifth of global oil shipments and significant volumes of natural gas, is now being blocked (despite Tehran insisting the strait remains open). 

A report published last weekend by the obscure financial analyst group, Citrini Research, on the future impact of AI apparently caused a stock market sell-off in software companies.  Citrini was little known until its “Global Intelligence Crisis” report suddenly amassed over 22 million views on X alone. The basic message was that, within a very few years ahead, AI ‘agents’ will quickly replace human labour in all sectors of the economy. 

Today marks the end of the fourth year of the Ukraine-Russia war. After four years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused staggering damage to Ukraine’s people and economy. There are wildly varying estimates of those killed or wounded in the war, as well as civilian casualties.  On the Ukraine and Western side, it is claimed that over 1m Russians have died, but less than 100,000 Ukrainians. 

The US economy expanded only at an annualised 1.4% in Q4 2025, well below forecasts of 3%, the advance estimate of real GDP showed. And over the whole 2025, the US economy expanded 2.2%, or below the 2.4% rate in 2024. The boasting of Trump and his advisers of a US boom doesn't look quite so convincing after these data. Investment in equipment and software products rose more than 8% in 2025, probably the result of the AI investment boom.

The kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Maduro and his wife by US military forces, the subsequent takeover by the Vice President Rodriguez and her agreement to allow the US to control Venezuela’s oil export revenues and to bring in US energy multi-nationals to invest – all this signals the end game of the Chavista revolution that began over 25 years ago. So it is very opportune that a new book has been published on what happened in Venezuela to reach this point.

Leading left economists Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis jointly wrote an article for the British newspaper, the Guardian this week.  It was headlined as “We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate – here are the first three steps.” Jason Hickel is professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a visiting senior fellow at LSE. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of